But wait, maybe ….

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Maybe there really is a problem there… (h/t Hot Air)

Heads exploding … WTF is going on at the White House?

Evolution is real!

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Benghazi-gate.  IRS-target-gate.  AP-Phone Records-gate.

Whether or not the various scandals are “Watergate” is a mistaken way of looking at the scandals, because we should not expect any presidency to be unhappy in the way other presidencies have been unhappy.

The Obama second term is unhappy in its own way.

The person with whom the IRS planted the question was Celia Roady, a tax lawyer who handles tax exempt issues and is very close to the IRS.

There is some dispute as to whether Roady initially denied the question was a set-up, with clear reporting by TPM as to Roady’s denial being partially walked back by two attendees who initially stated that Roady denied the set-up but now say it may not have been that clear.

Regardless, Roady now is at the center of a firestorm, as the IRS setting up the question and answer sends a message of consciousness of guilt.  The mainstream media now is all over it.

Jonathan Steele at Legal Ethics Forum sees Roady as something of a victim here:

The story is still developing but it now appears that the lawyer who was prompted to ask the planted question at the ABA conference did not know the answer and was surprised at Lerner’s answer. If that’s true, think about how rotten that was: set up a colleague to ask what will become a notorious Q-and-A when she assumed it was just an ordinary question at an ordinary conference and would be answered with the same, ordinary answer the IRS had been giving Congress and the public for some time. Now, unfortunately, when that lawyer’s name pops up here or there it will be associated with the IRS’s deceptive scheme. When a federal agency has been falsely answering a persistent, urgent question from Congress, the agency should report the truth directly to the Congress rather than scheme to create a ruse (and use an unwitting accomplice) only when the truth is going to come out anyway. That’s active concealment of bad conduct.

I agree but only to a very limited point.  It was rotten of the IRS to have Roady ask the question.

But, Roady knew that she was asking a planted question and when the bombshell answer dropped, she could have told people that it was a set-up question.

Roady did not make that disclosure at the time, as far as anyone has reported, presumably because of her close relationship with the IRS.

As the days dragged on, and speculation swirled as to whether the question was planted, Roady was silent as far as I can tell. It was only after congressional testimony disclosing the set-up that Roady made the disclosure.

Roady still has not responded to my request for comment.

The only victims here are the Tea Party and conservative groups who were subjected to political targeting at the IRS.

Sounds like a good idea to me. (details and locations at the link)

On behalf of Tea Party, Patriot groups, 9/12, liberty activists, and the American people, we are calling for anyone and everyone to protest the IRS’ complete abuse of power on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at noon local time.

Right now we are determining the best locations to host these rallies, so please let us know if you are available to go and where you are located. We will use the information to identify the closest IRS offices so that we get the most patriots to each location.

IRS Protests

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is out of control and we need to stand up and let them know that we will not take their intimidation tactics!

They have maps which demonstrate The high cost of low information voters.

I need to stop checking in there, because they have stuff like this:

How are banks robbing your kids?

By lending them money at rates which are lower than your kids could borrow for any other purpose … because your kids are really, really bad credit risks.

It’s robbery according to Upworthy channeling Elizabeth Warren because the Federal Reserve lends banks in overnight or very short term arrangements money at a super low rate to help stabilize liquidity in the banking system in close to risk-free transactions.

Now The [high-information] Truth About Elizabeth Warren’s Student Loan Crusade:

With that mix of populist rhetoric and subterfuge, Senator Warren stands to whip up a mob of angry students (and pundits) who will demand that the government drop the interest rate on student loans to 0.75 percent. Good luck reasoning with a mob. [I interrupt this quotation to keep this on one homepage screen because otherwise you will not read it, go to link for more high information.]

Let me frame the issue in a way everyone can understand:

Fed short-term risk-free loans to banks
≠ Bank long-term very risky loans to your kids
≠ Robbery

Only in the world of low information could banks helping fund your kids’ education when no one else will lend them money be turned into robbery.

And only in the world of low-information could inflating the bubble be considered a good thing for your kids, when it is not:

Maybe college kids do deserve to take out loans at the Fed’s discount rate—or at the very least something closer to it. But even if student loans were given at 0% it wouldn’t stop the fact that students are spending huge sums on degrees that are utterly useless and have absolutely no real world application.

Think I’m worrying about nothing?  Low information spreads really easily:

Really easily:

So Markey is in hiding:

While Republican Gabriel E. Gomez held nine public events this week, his Democratic rival, Edward J. Markey, held none, sparking criticism from Gomez that the veteran congressman is ignoring voters and avoiding the public eye.

“He’s been hiding,” Gomez said Friday, during a stop at Mul’s Diner in South Boston….

But Markey’s lack of public events with voters means he runs the risk of appearing to repeat the mistakes of Attorney General Martha Coakley, who was accused of running a lackluster campaign and snubbing voters before her loss to Scott Brown in the 2010 special Senate election.

Markey also is playing hide and seek with his tax returns:

After days of requests from reporters and his GOP opponent, Democrat US Representative Edward J. Markey said he will release his tax returns “in the very near future” to match the financial disclosure provided by his rival in the US Senate campaign, Republican Gabriel E. Gomez.

“I’m going to go back as far as he did and I’m going to release my tax returns,” Markey said on WCVB-TV’s On the Record. Gomez has released six years’ worth of returns.

But he still declined to commit to a day for their release saying only that he would provide them, “in the very near future.”

But this passive campaign contrasts with Markey’s aggressive pejorative advertising.

Markey ran an attack ad earlier this month that tried to negatively influence Massachusetts voters by placing images of Gomez, a former US Navy SEAL, side by side with Osama bin Laden.  Now he’s exploiting the Newtown tragedy to try and smear his opponent.

In Markey’s latest attack ad, a narrator reads the following while juxtaposing Gomez’s face beside a pile of bullets:

“Gomez is against banning assault weapons.  And Gomez is against banning high capacity magazines, like the ones used in the Newtown school shooting.”

Gomez publicly denounced the ad, and chided Markey for a tactic he described as “sick.”

“First, Congressman Markey slandered me by comparing me to Osama bin Laden. Now in his most recent TV ad, Markey blames me for the horrific Newtown shooting,” Gomez said.

“I guess after 37 years in Congress you lose your sense of decency. Exploiting a tragedy for political gain is sick.”

“I am the father of four children, who, like every person in America, was horrified by the shootings in Newtown.  I served as a US Navy SEAL who knows firsthand what happens when bad people get access to guns.”

“The only gun measure before Congress is the Toomey-Manchin proposal for expanded background checks which, just as I do, Congressman Markey supports,” said Gomez.

Meanwhile, as the nation is focused on the recent IRS scandal and expressing legitimate concerns about how the IRS will enforce Obamacare, SEIU, the nation’s most notable union of health care workers, is spending more than $340,000 to support Markey.  (Not that SEIU would care much about the IRS issue themselves, given that they were sure to obtain waivers to exempt themselves from a key provision in the health care law).

But these aren’t surprising antics from Markey.  Really, what more could we expect from a Washington insider of more than three decades?  When he’s not taking credit for the technological advances of the world, the man once nicknamed “Rep Nanny” by his local newspaper would rather call concerns about Benghazi a “bogus theory.”

I emphasize “relatively.”

• Occupy brings “two chickens, three goats and a rabbit” as part of takeover of U. California farm
• Swarthmore’s descent into madness
• Louisiana State Hosts “Lavender Graduation” For Homosexual Grads

Six Degrees of Separation:

• Stanford University – Where the accused are guilty until proven guilty
• Reason TV covers new government mandated speech codes on campus
• Yale faces six figure fine for underreporting sex offenses
• U. of Texas – Arlington Fined for Improper Crime Reports

Professors, can’t live with them, can’t live without them:

• Columbia Professor’s ‘Anti-Jewish Screed’ Draws Fire
• NYU prof busted for filming women in dressing rooms
• Charges dropped against U. Buffalo prof who verbally assaulted pro-life display
• Feminists at U-VA attack alum for stating the obvious
• San Jose State scrubs photo of professors burning book

Art imitates life, and vice versa:

• The Onion notices the economic plight of American college students

Not all is lost:

• Emerson College Student: Affirmative Action is Government-Sponsored Racism
• Video Review of the Bowdoin College diversity dustup
• Conservative activist James O’Keefe talks citizen journalism at Northwestern

You can’t take away their DREAMS:

• 15 Conservatives You Wish Had Spoken At Your College Graduation

(Do you really want to know?)

.@tomkattman heh, I almost feel that I’m not doing enough for my country since the IRS hasn’t targeted me yet.

— Fuzzy Slippers (@fuzislippers) May 17, 2013

Hell, I just wish Indie bloggers made enough money to worry about the IRS targeting them. LOL

— DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) May 18, 2013

@leginsurrection <– he feels my pain ha haha

— DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) May 18, 2013

I actually was proud of the job the House Republicans did given the time constraints. They had some fight in them. Hopefully they will keep it up for 3 1/2 more years. Every. Single. Day.

I posted some videos at the earlier Live post, including Kevin Brady (TX-08), Charles Boustany, Jr. (LA-03) and Peter Roskam (IL-06).

Here are some more.

Mike Kelly (PA-03)

Tom Reed (NY-23)(my Congressman in Ithaca!!!)

Todd Young (IN-09)(One of LI’s Operation Counterweight 2010 candidates)

Tim Griffin (AR-02)

The Financial Times was hacked Friday, according to a notice posted by the outlet.

The Financial Times has become the latest news outlet to be hacked by supporters of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, following a phishing attack on the company’s email accounts.

Twelve posts entitled “Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army” appeared on the FT’s tech blog between 12.38pm and 12.42pm on Friday, with official Twitter feeds also disrupted.

“We have now locked those accounts and are grateful for Twitter’s help on this,” said Robert Shrimsley, the managing editor of FT.com.

This is merely the latest in a string of attacks from the Syrian Electronic Army, which has made news outlets a primary target in its PR campaign to spread pro-Assad propaganda and attempt to intimidate those who are critical of the Syrian government as civil war rages on in the region.

The most notable incident occurred last month when the same group of hackers claimed responsibility for utilizing phishing methods to gain access to the Twitter account of the Associated Press.  What followed was a tweet that there had been two explosions at the White House and that President Barack Obama was injured.  The false information temporarily plunged the Dow Jones industrial average.

Other attacks by the same group in recent weeks include that on The Guardian, and on E!Online.  The latter was a more strategic strike than many may realize, clearly designed to leverage the cultural popularity of the account to maximize exposure to a broad audience.  It also highlighted the dangers that social media poses in such attacks, and the potential for hackers to spread malicious code via links in a viral manner.

The Syrian Electronic Army has been conducting such attacks for well over a year.

In a post titled Hacking the News: Information Warfare in the Age of Twitter, Legal Insurrection outlined many of the prior attacks and broader concerns about the actions of the Syrian Electronic Army and other hackers.  While the individual incidents may seem relatively benign to some, the collective damage that could be done – especially by way of hijacking the news with false information – has the potential to be far greater and have far-reaching impacts.  It is a trend that deserves continued vigilance in monitoring.

Roady confirmed the arrangement after the testimony with TPM:

Celia Roady, a partner in the Washington D.C. office of Morgan Lewis and a member of the the IRS’ Advisory Committee on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities, said she got a call from Lois Lerner, head of the IRS’ tax-exempt organizations division, on May 9, the day before Lerner appeared on a panel at the American Bar Association tax section’s annual meeting.

“On May 9, I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the ABA Tax Section’s Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks,” Roady said in the statement, obtained by TPM. “I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day. We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question.”

But in a prior TPM report on May 14, attendees at the conference stated that Roady denied any prearrangement when questioned immediately after the Q&A which had shocked the audience:

“We all just sort of looked at each other and couldn’t quite understand,” Ellen Aprill, a professor at Loyola Law School who was in the audience, told TPM on Monday. “It seemed so odd that it was such a detailed response to the question rather than part of her prepared remarks.”

Paul Streckfus, the editor of EO Tax Journal, an online publication for exempt organization tax practitioners, told TPM he had been “dozing off” when Roady had asked the question, but had “jumped almost out of my seat” when he realized what Lerner was saying. (Streckfus recorded the panel and provided the transcript of Roady’s question to TPM.) Once Lerner had finished, Streckfus rushed up along with another reporter to question Lerner further, but she begged off….

It’s not unheard of for questions to be planted at events like Friday’s, but no one TPM talked to believed that Roady’s question had set up in advance. Both Aprill and Streckfus said they had asked Roady directly about the issue. Roady denied any arrangement.

“I know that some people in the audience thought it was set up, but I talked to Celia [Roady],” Aprill said. “It was not a set up. And I believe Celia. I’ve known Celia for years.”

I reached out to Roady, Aprill and Streckfus for comment, but have not had a response.

UPDATE 7:10pm EST: 

The following response was received via email from Ellen Aprill after this post went live:

“In light of information today, I now see that I must have misunderstood/misinterpreted her.  I think I asked her something like, “what just happened” and I think she responded along the lines “I was surprised.”  I thought she was referring to the whole interchange and she must have been referring to the specifics of Ms. Lerner’s answer.”

UPDATE 5-18-2013 2:50 p.m. — The following email was just received:

Bill, thanks for your email. I think I’m now up to 20 media inquiries about recent IRS developments, so I am a bit backed up

Unfortunately, I did not have my tape recorder with me when I saw Celia Roady on Friday, May 10, to which you reference. The panel had just ended and people were milling about and I was heading for the men’s room when I saw Ms. Roady talking to some people. I remember saying something to her about whether her question to Lois Lerner was a set-up, which was my initial assumption. I don’t know for sure whether she heard me in the confusion and I’m not sure whether the answer I thought I heard was in response to my question or to someone else’s. My best recollection is that she merely smiled when I asked her in passing if it had been a set-up. I usually always have my tape recorder with me at these meetings, but I don’t take it with me to the men’s room, as I don’t want to record those sounds. Hope this helps. Paul Streckfus.

NEW POST — Was Celia Roady, who asked the planted question, a victim of the IRS?

It shows Obama’s really bad two media days:

Each bubble represents a topic discussed in relation to President Obama from May 15-16, 2013, sized by volume and shaded according to average sentiment. This incorporates mentions gathered across all media channels, including news media, social media, Twitter, and general websites (including the blogosphere). The greener the bubble, the more positive the issue; the redder the bubble, the more negative.

Scandals and other negative stories have dominated the news, tearing into Obama’s information flow across the
board and bleeding into areas that are usually considered positive for the President.

Click on “Full Screen” below to enlarge and for full infographic:

ObamaWatch — TargetPoint Consulting National Dialogue Monitor May 15 and 16 2013

Benghazi was very much in the news prior to the election. The concealment went to the culpability of the Obama administration in failing to heed warnings about security at the Benghazi consulate, the nature of the pre-planned al-Qaeda attack, the scrubbing of the talking points used by Susan Rice, the failure to go to the aid of Americans in trouble, and the claim that the attack was a result of a YouTube video.

That concealment, which now has been exposed in part (much information still has not been released), helped Obama out on an issue which was very much a part of the campaign, and allowed Obama to rebound in the second and third presidential debates after a disastrous first debate put the election outcome in doubt.

The Benghazi concealment allowed the media and the Obama campaign to get away with distractions such as whether Mitt Romney should have issued a press statement, and whether Obama’s generalized non-specific use of the term “acts of terror” constituted an admission that the Benghazi attack was terrorism. These distractions, rather than the administration’s defalcation of duty, worked to Obama’s great advantage.

The other concealment went to an even more explosive issue, the deliberate and concerted targeting by the IRS of Tea Party and conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, and leaks of information about conservative groups.

The stories now are legion, and growing, of IRS stall tactics and inappropriate delving into religious and political beliefs, and the identification of persons with whom the groups interacted. No such targeting took place as to liberal and progressive groups. This targeting was known to senior IRS officials long before the election, but was kept quiet in a variety of ways (including denying such documents existed in response to a FOIA request) until after the election.

That the IRS sought to break the scandal through a planted question and answer at a Bar Association event speaks volumes to the consciousness of guilt.

The IRS targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups not only advantaged supporters of Obama, it kept out of the public domain a very potent issue which would have driven a massive anti-Obama turnout among Tea Party and conservative voters generally unenthused about Mitt Romney.

In each of these concealments, it appears that the dirty work was done by agencies under the control of the Obama administration.

It matters not whether Obama has plausible deniability personally because he allegedly only learns about scandals from the news. These people reported to him directly or indirectly, and they took it upon themselves to conceal from the American public prior to the election facts which, if known, would have greatly damaged Obama’s campaign and inspired his opponents.

The election of 2012 was tainted by All the President’s Concealers.

Richard Engel spoke earlier this week at the Newseum’s memorial for journalists killed in the line of duty during 2012.

Spoke at newseum today on journalists killed in 2012, and controversy on who to include. c-spanvideo.org/program/312711…

— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) May 13, 2013

The Newseum’s website carries a brief account of the speech.

Journalists take risks, Engel said, “to understand the world and how it changes. We go to where the cracks are.” The honored journalists died “doing what they loved. They died in the line of duty with their boots on and their pen in hand.”

Unfortunately there is no complete transcript of the speech, but the speech is available at C-SPAN. Someone preserved the clip in which Engel addressed the Hamas controversy.

Engel acknowledges, at the beginning that not everyone who has a pen and a camera is a journalist, some are activists. A journalist, according to Engel, unlike an activist, doesn’t have causes but principles. Then he notes that a number of those activists were fighting the Syrian regime, which silenced them. He hailed them for fighting against tyranny. So was Engel equating Syrian rebels with Hamas?

If Engel endorses the righteousness of some causes over others, isn’t he then an activist rather than a journalist?

Contrary to Engel’s muddled analysis, there are lines. Al Aqsa TV is a terrorist organization designated so by the Treasury Department. That makes its employees terrorists, not activists.

The Newseum removed the names of the two members of Hamas from its list, but it didn’t remove the name of Ali Abbas, an employee of Assad’s official SANA news agency. Since Engel called the Assad regime a dictatorship, does he mean that propaganda in the service of a dictator (or oppression) should be protected?

According to news reports Engel was held by Assad loyalists. Does it bother him that that one of those honored as a journalist killed in the line of duty was aligned with those who captured, threatened and tormented him and his crew? I feel nothing but sympathy for Engel who must have endured hell for five days, but by refusing to draw a line between news gathering and propaganda, he diminishes his own suffering. There are villains in this world and it isn’t activism to identify them as such.

Contrast Engel’s slippery assertions with those of Marvin Kalb in assessing the role of media in modern warfare:

If we are to collect lessons from this war, one of them would have to be that a closed society can control the image and the message that it wishes to convey to the rest of the world far more effectively than can an open society, especially one engaged in an existential struggle for survival. An open society becomes the victim of its own openness. During the war, no Hezbollah secrets were disclosed, but in Israel secrets were leaked, rumors spread like wildfire, leaders felt obliged to issue hortatory appeals often based on in complete knowledge, and journalists were driven by the fire of competition to publish and broadcast unsubstantiated information. A closed society conveys the impression of order and discipline; an open society, buffeted by the crosswinds of reality and rumor, criticism and revelation, conveys the impression of disorder, chaos and uncertainty, but this impression can be misleading.

This is fundamental truth that seems to have eluded Richard Engel and the Newseum. Not all news is created equal. When propaganda (or worse) is equated with news, it emboldens the bad actors in the world.

The use of chemical weapons and Obama’s fudged “red line” has given way to gruesome footage of a schismatic Syrian rebel commander biting into the lung of a slain Hezbollah fighter and vowing revenge against Assadist soldiers. Such is the international press’ attention span that the far more significant development in Syria has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The al-Bayda and Baniyas massacres that occurred earlier this month were not just crimes against humanity; they signaled the clearest evidence to date of the regime’s transformation from a conventional military force into a consortium of sectarian Alawite-Shiite militias, which have been trained and financed by Iran, or reactivated after years of desuetude. Unlike the Syrian Army, which has claimed to be fighting a nationalist battle against foreign-backed interests, these armed proxies make no pretense about their true objective: to ethnically cleanse Syria’s Sunni population in the strategically vital western corridor of the country.

On May 2, around 400 people were slaughtered, and possibly as many as 800 disappeared, in the Syrian coastal hamlet of al-Bayda. Of those killed, 200 were buried in a mass grave in which only 150 bodies were identifiable, the rest having been mutilated beyond all recognition. According to The New York Times, which interviewed eyewitnesses and survivors of the massacre, pro-regime forces clad or semi-clad in military fatigues went house to house, separating men and boys above the age of 10 from women and younger children. Whole families were executed and images have since emerged showing children piled atop each other, some with half their faces blown off. Corpses later recovered in al-Bayda were said to include “the burned body of a baby just a few months old” and “a fetus ripped from a woman’s belly.” Two days later, on May 4, a similar massacre was repeated in Ras al-Nabeh, a district near the city of Baniyas.

In contrast to previous atrocities, the regime neither denied that these massacres had taken place nor tried to blame it on the opposition. Rather, it boasted of its success. State television claimed that the army had “crushed a number of terrorists,” while pro-regime Facebook pages displayed those grisly photographs of butchered children, categorizing them as militants.